Mobile messenger Kakao announced on Dec. 16 that it its taxi-hailing application Kakao Taxi passed the milestone of 50 million total requests as of Dec. 13.

Demand for Kakao Taxi has boomed since its launch on March 31, seeing 1 million ride requests in one moth and a half. Since then, the accumulative number of requests exceeded 50 million in the past 8 months, reaching 600,000 requests a day on average. The number of taxis registered for the taxi-hailing service has also been on the rise, with more than 190,000, or around 70 percent of all taxis nationwide participating.

Chung Joo-hwan, vice president of the business division at Daum Kakao, said, “In less than a year after the launch, Kakao Taxi is being recognized as the leading brand of taxi service providers as well as mobile taxi-hailing apps.”

Meanwhile, Daum Kakao also launched its premium taxi-hailing service Kakao Taxi Black on Nov. 3, making a lot of profit. Kakao Taxi Black, which provides ride services with 100 premium sedans with an engine capacity of 3,000 cc such as the Mercedes-Benz E-Class, is showing stable growth in terms of both the number of requests and sales.